Posted
by
samzenpus
on Thursday June 05, 2008 @03:54AM
from the we've-always-been-at-war-with-eurasia dept.

An anonymous reader writes "No one seems to have noticed that Sweden is close to passing a far-reaching wiretapping program that would greatly expand the government's spying capabilities by permitting it to monitor all email and telephone traffic coming in and out of the country. If a bill before parliament becomes law, the country's National Defence Radio Establishment (FRA) will monitor all internet traffic that passes in or out of the country. As the article notes, there's a good chance email traveling from, say, the UK to Finland would be fair game, since it's likely to traverse through Sweden before reaching its final destination. So far, there's been nary a peep from Swedish media about the plan."

The blockage was marketed as an attempt to break net neutrality. However, choosing a network hosting key information sites at a crucial period just prior to an important decision was a bit of cleverness.

Telia-Sonera could have easily routed around the outage, but chose not to. As a result, Telia-Sonera's customers (both business and private) were blocked by actions/inactions b

There has actually been quite a lot of fuss around this law. For example, a seldomly used law paragraph enabled the social democratic minority to delay this proposal for a year, something which gained quite some attention when it happened. If that had not been done, the law would have passed a year ago.
An update to what was happening during this period is available at http://www.idg.se/2.1085/1.156736 [www.idg.se] (swedish only). IDG is the largest swedish news agency for technology-related news.
At the national swedish radio homepage http://www.sr.se/cgi-bin/ekot/artikel.asp?Artikel=1242136 [www.sr.se] you can read about finlands protests against the law. They also published news about the growing criticism of the law at http://www.sr.se/Ekot/artikel.asp?artikel=1240436 [www.sr.se] (both links in swedish).

Actual sources of news are newspapers like DN (the daily news), Göteborgs-posten, Svenska Dagbladed, Sydsvenskan, Dagens Industri, Metro, City etc most of which are read by as many people as the tabloids.

This has more to do with being able to help forieign surveilance than any domestic spying. When an ally calls for help sweden will use this to be able to bend over properly and hand over any domestic information about the targets living in sweden. Swedish domestic security has never been self-sustained but rather a help organization for ally interests like the US.

This is SWEDEN! Since when has IT been a hotbed for terrorists or drug dealers? Middle-eastern terrorists moving to the cold sub-arctic climate of Scandinavia? Drug lords from the Columbian jungles? Not bloody likely.

It can't be militarily inspired either; Sweden is "non aligned" and has (officially) maintained a neutral stance in all wars for (nearly) the last 200 years, and they are not a party to NATO or a similar organization/treaty. Sweden has, in fact, the longest tenure of neutrality of any country in the world (yes, that includes Switzerland).

So, they're going to wage war against, and gather enormous amounts of intelligence on, its own citizens, instead? Are they going to raise the already highest tax rates in the world to pay for this needless Britain-esque surveillance?

This has nothing to do with terrorists or drugs, and everything to do with copyright "enforcement" and having more "legal" ways to gather data on Pirate Bay, their users, and other services that may set up shop there. There's no other plausible explanation.

I found this report from the EU parliament very interesting: http://www.fas.org/irp/program/process/rapport_echelon_en.pdf [fas.org]
At page 27 there is a list of all countries intercepting private communications, and basically everyone does it? I think some former FRA employee basically admitted they have done this sort of thing for a long time already too.
I'm by no means saying this is ok, but it's kinda interesting how Google reacted on this for example. They said they can't put their servers in Sweden, but US/UK etc is fine? What is the differance?

They said they can't put their servers in Sweden, but US/UK etc is fine? What is the differance?

Perhaps the difference is who they primarily serve? If most requests come from the US or UK, then placing servers within the country reduces Googles exposure to surveillance because the transmissions are domestic not international.

The difference is that the FRA have not been spying in wire before. That is illegal, today the telcos are not allowed to give out any traffic or personal data without a specific court order, some of the data they are not even allowed to save. This bill, and the EU-dataretention bill is about to change all of that.
The FRA (roughly The Defence Radio Agency) have been listening only to radio, satellites and such. But in the recent debate we have come to learn that even that practise is illegal according to s

ECHELON was funamentally justified somewhat differently -- the UK would spy on US territory, and the US would spy on UK territory. This is nominally legal under the guise of national intelligence efforts against a potential/past enemy. Then they would share information under the guise of international law enforcement. What is clearly illegal (verging on treason) is the willful failure of counterintelligence -- the US & the UK have a duty to protect their citizens against foreign spying of all kinds.

First: As one living in Sweden I don't recognize this description. For one, there is quite a stir in IT related, and mainstream media about this. And this have been going on for several years. The current government suggested this while in opposition a couple of years ago, and it was one of the first new legislations that they announced when they got into power 2006. It's been under debateand scrutiny in media and several governmental instances since then.

Secondly: FRA is _not_ a military organization. It's a civil autority that can be used for several other governmental organizations such as the police, secret police, military or even state owned corporations. But the name is confusing, I grant you that.

One interessting thing is that FRA operates the fifth fastest computer on the Top500 list. Most people believe that is was purchased to meet the need of this new surveillance demand.

It's hardly unknown to the public, even if most are not interessted in such matters. Swedes are pretty used to governmental control and oversight, and we acually enjoy the benefits of it. Our trust in authoroty of this kind is strong since it have served us well in the past.

Such as a personal ID number. It's hard to find swedes that doesn't belive that it's a good thing. A national medical journal database is wanted, and having this connected to the database with prescriptions. Automated tax declatations are quite enjoyed too. There are more things that most Sweds enjoy: automated enrollment into schools, child benefits, state funded mandatory vaccinations and dental care.I certainly doesn't speak for ALL Swedes but for the sake of argument, I'm speaking for most. I'm quite su

Personally I'd want them to just create one big administrative authority instead of current:* CSN (student loans and money)* FÃrsÃkringskassan (if you are sick, or your children are, or handicapped, or for whatever else reason can't work)* ArbetsfÃrmedlingen (employment office)* Socialomsorgen (social security / welfare)* Skatteverket (tax administration)Or atleast let them share their journals/databases with each other, which they aren't allowed now unless you give them permission to. This j

I don't vote for it. I consistently vote against the people who end up in power. So why should I trust them? It ultimately comes down to trusting my fellow citizens, who have uniformly shown themselves to be worthless chowderheads when it comes to voting for politicians.

I generally avoid voting for the two main parties, because the two main parties are both completely untrustworthy.To answer your question, I voted for Obama. He may end up winning, but since that vote didn't put him into government it doesn't invalidate what I said.

If you mean that other Clinton, I was not old enough to vote in 1996.

Even if my record is not 100%, it doesn't change my argument one whit. Even if 100% of the people I vote for make it into office, that still leaves 98 senators and several hundr

Well, much media have covered that FRA got a new machine atleast, and I would guess that TPB, Piratpartiet, IDG, various forums such as Sweclockers, Flashback and such have discussed what it may lead to / why it may have been bought.

Swedes are pretty used to governmental control and oversight, and we acually enjoy the benefits of it. Our trust in authoroty of this kind is strong since it have served us well in the past.

I do not concur, and I know many who agree with me (disagrees with you). I don't trust my government more then I trust a stranger on the street. And I certainly do not enjoy my privacy being stepped on like a rug.

Swedes are pretty used to governmental control and oversight, and we acually enjoy the benefits of it. Our trust in authoroty of this kind is strong since it have served us well in the past.

This is partly correct and partly bullshit. Swedes usually do have a positive view on turning authority over to the state, that part seems to be true. The reasons for why this is true are very much debatable. Some, like historian Peter Englund, point to the fact that the King often stood with the peasantry against the no

Most people in Sweden don't mind far reaching goverment power, however this program doesn't only capture all the traffic passing the border, it'll also capture most of the traffic that's not passing the border aswell.

And the bill doesn't cover just internet, it covers any information going by wire.

Imho BodstrÃm suck, it wouldn't surprise me if it's just that BodstrÃms and Folkpartiet got similair ideas, but back when we had Socialdemokraterna in the government maybe they/most of them didn't cared that much because BodstrÃm was one of theirs, but now when Folkpartiet got a similair opinion they have started to care more. What do I know. I to belive both sides would accept it thought.Most people who know what BodstrÃm wants probably dislike him, I know I for sure do, the problem is

Today FRA has the lawful right and ability to monitor all communication that is broadcast using radio/wave-transmission, since much(most?) traffic at some point goes via satellite and/or radio link they already listen in.The new bill gives them the right to tap into the cables directly, but it also leaves a possibility for them to share their information with other government bodies, and that is the real kicker. So if you write in an e-mail that you drove home drunk yesterday, that could be used against you

is this attitude on slashdot: shocked, shocked i tell you, that a governmental organization is not going to protect my information for me

encrypt if you don't want it snooped on. if it goes out on the wire, it is prone to being intercepted and snooped on, by the government or someone else. you realize that, right? so where is all the shock and amazement coming from that a government is doing what governments always do?

i'm not saying you don't have a right to privacy. i'm saying you are absurd if you rely on a government organization to protect your privacy for you. regardless of the law. YOU need to protect your privacy. you can't expect the government to do that competently, regardless of the law. and then, in a forum populated with a bunch of people supposedly experienced enough with the subject matter, to come from this position of complete naivete on the subject?

all i am saying is that its just kind of disingenuous for a lot of you, who to start from the default position of healthy distrust of government... to suddenly express shock and amazement at a government trying to snoop on you. this is a new concept to you? you're not jaded and cynical at this point, as you SHOULD be on the subject matter of governments and snooping if you have any awareness of the subject matter? folks: your shock and amazement is only possible if massive trust in government is your default position. you see the absurdity in that, right?

"omg! my government wants to spy on me? the idea never occured to me!"

So you are not visiting other sites than encrypted ones?
People seem to forget that aspect, what sites you are visiting is often more sensitive than what info you transmit. Think of those times you are searching the net for something, drowning in irrelevant hits, visiting sites just to discover it did not contain what you where looking for. The state cannot see what you thought of the page you just where visiting, the only see that you requested and got it sent to you. So, do not visit wrong pages in the f

where you will go searching for information about xyz, and no one out there will have any record of your search?i'm not talking about government policy here, i'm talking about basic understanding of the technology: don't you think it is rather absurd of you to expect anonymity from a system that is fundamentally nothing but open packets traversing random nodes?

once you accept the notion of the complete lack of anonymity on the internet, why do you expect government policy to suddenly come in, and not only v

It is not absurd when looked upon from a power perspective. Yes google can see any searches i do, but they wont see what i do at yahoo, so can site owners and most important, neither google, yahoo or any site owner has any way near the power to hurt me as my govenment has. Is is about the trust of the messenger, the same goes for the old postal service, snail-mail. This trust comes from the law. Today it is illegal to eavesdrop on private communication, this is what ISPs earn their trust from. The trusted p

the question is, why do you think that such a villainous government would wait for a stupid law to sift the internet? either the government acts virtuously, or it doesn't. currently, your operating assumption about how the government acts has contradictory characteristics: on one hand, you expect a law to be passed, and then suddenly every governmental official will behave unerringly to the letter of that law. on the other hand, you expect the government to go out and rape your rights in secret no matter wh

Why they would wait? Because they cannot do it today.
The state simply do not have the access today, the infrastructure required is not built.
What the bill proposes is that the owners of all bordering nodes should install special hardware and cables to the FRA, but not paid by the FRA. This copying would also be illegal today. So, none of the telcos have this infrastructure today, because it would both make no sense and be illegal.

there's that same fallacy: we need a law to protect us from people who don't obey the law;-P

follow your opinion of the government all the way through: you say it is going to rape your rights, a heinous thing to do. ok, so, we will simply pass a law, and **poof** magically, heinous people will suddenly be virtuous

i'm not saying the government is heinous. i'm not saying the government is virtuous. i'm saying you need to make up your mind. be

you believe a government that harasses people just for exercising their democratic rights would wait for a law to spy on you?why do you trust the government to behave so upstanding and forthright on one hand, and then expect nothing from them but fascist harassment... all in the same thought?

fix your impression of the government in one of the two modes you present to me in your statements above:

1. the government obeys the letter of the law all of the time, it is always well-behaved2. the government wants to

you can't have it both ways friend. either the government is well-behaved, or it isn't. you can't expect good behavior (they will respect my rights) at the same time you expect bad behavior (they will rape my rights). it's one or the other

No, it isn't even remotely that simple. Governments change. "Behaviors" which were benign under one regime may not be so benign under the next, or after a particularly spectacular national trauma removes previously-accepted constraints. When you allow those behaviors to

I don't want my private communication snooped on. So, does anyone have experience with what is the easiest and least intrusive way to push email encryption on less technical friends and family? I would prefer something I can install/activate for them which automatically encrypt/decrypt emails to/from me, while still allows them to communicate as usual with others. Preferably an open-standard multi-platform / multi-program solution.

If things really are not this easy, maybe it is time to work hard on develop

there is no model of the internet where you are wrapped in a magic tcp/ip bubblewrap cloak of protection from government snooping

it's not about the the law. you have a fundamental misunderstanding about your privacy and the technology involved. once you understand how the internet works, you wouldn't expect absurd things like "go ahead and snoop, but just not on me"

the snooping doesn't make it possible to map your social network, the structure of the internet makes it possible to map your social network. you and other idealists basically say: "i want a free and open network... that is also locked up and closed" what?look: the internet is good thing, because it is open. but all good things also have a downside. the downside is that any expectation of privacy is absurd in an environment which, inherent to the technology, has none

I know it's a pipe dream, but if enough of us would encrypt everything we can that crosses the internet we could vote with our resource consumption and force the bastards to be selective about what they decrypt. Our individual privacy would thus be somewhat assured by the signal to noise ratio.

At about 20 points in the national information infrastructure network, all traffic is spliced off and fed into the Försvarets Radioanstalt (FRA) agency. These points are placed as to catch all traffic entering and leaving the Swedish borders, but will catch much - if not most - domestic traffic too, for technical routing reasons. Electronic traffic, in particular, always takes the scenic route.

This affects all Internet traffic and all telephony traffic, meaning web surfing, e-mail, phone, and fax are affected, to mention but a few.

The FRA will scan all traffic in real time according to about 250,000 search criteria. The traffic that matches will be automatically saved for manual intelligence analysis. This obviously takes a lot of computing power. We don't know the exact extent of FRA's computing power, but we do know that they have the world's fifth most powerful computer [top500.org], in competition mostly with nuclear physics labs.

"Customers" that will be able to place requests for searches include all authorities (all some 500 of them including Department of Transportation, Department of Agriculture, etc., but notably the police, secret service and customs).

The political administration may order (not request, but order) a political wiretapping to catch communications they are interested in.

Major businesses will also get access to the wiretapping grid, but will have to go through an authority.

The bill specifically allows for singling out Swedish people for specific wiretapping, although only under certain qualifiers.

The mandate for the agency's own intelligence gathering is broadened from "external military threats" to "external threats", which are exemplified as international crime; trafficking in drugs, weapons, or people; migration movements; religious or cultural conflicts; environmental imbalances and threats; raw materials shortages; and currency speculation. More examples are listed.

More telling are his quotes of comments from Sweden's own law enforcement:============Responses to the billHow did the bureaucrats respond? In unusually plain language, actually.

The Department of Justice, among other similar comments, simply called the bill "completely alien to our form of government".

The Police Board said that the bill "indicates a frightening lack of understanding for the requirements regarding the protection of citizens' privacy that follow from our Constitution and the European Conventi

The United States has already said that pretty much any private communication it can get hold of is fair game. Does anybody have the feeling that a lot of other countries are responding by taking the view that, "If you read my mail, I"m sure as hell going to read yours."

So the number of countries who read your email depends on the number of countries the servers are in that it passes through. At least with snail mail, you'd _see_ the greasy fingerprints and cum stains on the envelope.

Sadly we can probably expect to see more countries in Europe pass these kind of laws as they realise the risks posed by their large Muslim populations. Sweden has a tradition of naively importing huge amounts of Muslims and then paying them very generous unemployment benefits (since they are usually ill equipped to work in a modern economy), and the effects are starting to be felt. Read more here [weeklystandard.com].

That said, European governments are just treating the symptoms of the problem rather than the root cause: religious extremism (and some would argue religion generally). The sooner we realise that, the better.

Back when the Soviet Union was tyrannizing everyone in it like this wiretapping, the "free" nations including Sweden, the UK and the US would never want anyone to think that we were doing it too. The example of the Soviets' evil was something of a deterrent to our own governments' being evil.Our governments still did evil. But the threat of being exposed as "as bad as the Soviets" tended to minimize it. Without the Soviet counterexample, our governments are going as wild on us as the Soviets were.

"The evidence gathered can (supposedly) not be used in regular criminal investigations for copyright infringement."

When the US put pressure on Sweden for ThePirateBay Swedish authorities happily broke multiple laws and smiled about it. I have no doubts that any information about petty things like small time copyright infringement will be handed over.

I personally think that this law might actually be a good thing. Due to the networked nature of the Internet, Sweden will be opening everyone's mail, not just the mail of their citizens. As a result, you might find that this prompts people to start truly using some decent encryption. If there was a sudden rise in encryption, individuals defending themselves might make this entire argument a moot point. If it takes a few dozen NASA (or Sweden's equivalent) super computers a few weeks to crack an e-mail, that fairly well rules out mass snooping.

The obvious counter is to make encryption without a back door illegal. With mobile open source projects which can set up home in any nation (or no nation) though, I think that the governments ability to enforce such absurdity would be rendered impotent.

I get your point about this forcing positive change, but the plan is still bullshit of the worst kind.

1 - Get enough nations to start monitoring foreign email and phone calls, claiming it's only for serious national security issues. Ban use for domestic spying or criminal investigation to appease opponents.

2 - Implement international information-sharing agreement for said national-security information. Implement it so well that the various nations are essentially accessing the same system, effectively bypassing the domestic-use ban since another country gathers the information for you.

4 - Greedy politicians bribed to allow access for DRM violations citing made up numbers about lost revenue for a dying recording industry.

5 - ???

6 - World-wide panopticon-enforced fascist dictatorship. The word "privacy" is removed from dictionaries of all languages. George Orwell's ghost stands slack-jawed from the realization that he vastly underestimated the degree of control governments are now able to enforce.

At this point in history I'd like to see an open source email client that automatically uses nsa-grade encryption. Make it dead simple & make it default. Basically this will be necessary to ensure freedom since corporate controlled government has no further use for it.

6 - World-wide panopticon-enforced fascist dictatorship. The word "privacy" is removed from dictionaries of all languages. George Orwell's ghost stands slack-jawed from the realization that he vastly underestimated the degree of control governments are now able to enforce.

How could you have a slogan like "freedom is slavery" when the concept of freedom has been abolished? The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinkingâ"not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.

a Little more subtle would be Heinlein's take on it in "Stranger in a Strange Land"

The obvious counter is to make encryption without a back door illegal.

Agreed.

With mobile open source projects which can set up home in any nation (or no nation) though, I think that the governments ability to enforce such absurdity would be rendered impotent.

I can see the obvious counter to that, and I don't like it at all. Thy will just make open source illegal, programming or asking about programming will be on par with e.g. chemistry, explosives, weaponry,... today. In the end, you will be only free if

The obvious counter is to make encryption without a back door illegal. With mobile open source projects which can set up home in any nation (or no nation) though, I think that the governments ability to enforce such absurdity would be rendered impotent.

I disagree. All they need to do is put those who USE such tools into jail. Location from those tools got downloaded doesn't matter at all. If such tools are illegal (their use is illegal) YOU will go to to jail - not the one who wrote those tools.

In sweden there is no such legal concept as "fruit from the bad tree". That is, any evidence (gathered regardless if a search was lawfull or not, will hold in court. Single police officers may loose their jobs, but the evidence found still hold.

Not that I think these laws will be passed to please the music and movie industries, but they could certainly use any evidence passed to them from this perfect, ever watching organization.

Doesn't screaming "1984" at the top of your lungs every single time technology and government occur in the same context ever get tiring? At least read some other dystopian books and put some variety in the alarmism!

C'mon, let's give some airtime to Hiro Protagonist and Bernard Marx at least. That's more where this kind of shit is headed to...

This "kind of shit" is about a surveillance society, and neither Brave New World nor Snow Crash is about that. It's true that always hearing about 1984 is getting tiresome, but unfortunately there is not a lot of other (popular) novels that put a strong emphasis on this subject. The sad truth is sci-fi is mostly interested in "cool" technology (even if this pseudo technology is absurd) rather than political ideas.

John Twelve Hawks writes fiction with all the technical accuracy of Dan Brown, but even less entertainment value.

Hawks likes to lecture about privacy in his books, but has little idea how surveilance and privacy technology actually work. This would be forgivable if the story made up for Hawk's lack of knowledge about the subject matter, but the characters are dreary and the story dragged-out and dull.

This one is almost certain to pass, a majority of parliament have already professed their coming yes-votes.

Party whips takes care of those who are critical to the law: It was up for a vote last year, but got put on a year-long hold for further debate (which, naturally, never took place). One member of parliament (Fredrick Federley) who was elected on a privacy platform, among other issues, abstained from voting and took so much heat from his party that he'll be voting yes this time around. At least according to his blog.

One member of parliament (Fredrick Federley) who was elected on a privacy platform, among other issues, abstained from voting and took so much heat from his party that he'll be voting yes this time around.

What a f*cking coward..The only parites that have had a consitently negative attitude towards this proposal has been the left party and the greens. One of the will get my vote in the next election.

Actually it's quite normal for european members of parliament to be forced to go along with their party's stance. In a few countries the parties can actually override a member's vote on a law.In all other countries it's easy to get thrown out of a party meaning that you have little chance to ever again make an impact on politics. But sometimes this means that you just got "unelected".

Actually it's quite normal for european members of parliament to be forced to go along with their party's stance.

Yes but that doesn't make his position right. If he has the principles he said he had when he was elected (he was elected with person-votes, where if a person gets at least x% of party votes he/she is automatically included among the partys MPs (assuming of course the party gets over 4% of the vote).

Some issues are worth getting thrown out of the party come next election for, this is one of them.

Then he should have been independant, or have gone for the position in the EU comission, in other words, he should have bribed the leader of the largest party. Sorry but that's the way the system works.

And, should you think that's bad, try going independant in a union election. It gets worse. Much worse.

Some issues are worth getting thrown out of the party come next election for, this is one of them.

They're politicians.

Certainly in the UK, it's likely to be all they've ever done since leaving university. And they very likely studied something with little practical application in the real world.

The upshot is that what they do versus what they say they'll do may or may not help them get re-elected (probably won't make much odds, voter apathy being what it is). But not towing the party line on a regular basis is a fantastically good way to find yourself thrown out of the party - which in turn is a fant

Thanks; if I had been drinking anything, I would have laughed it out of my nose when I read this!

think "how would a government react if the president were republican, the vice president democratic, the secretary of state republican,...".

But that's not exactly how it works in America. When the powers are split between the parties (executive is one party, senate and/or house is a different party) then they accomplish nothing at all; and I learned long ago that gridlock is how the founding fathers assured we would preserve stability in our laws.

In other words you get the combined downsides of all parties : massive taxes (democrat), sweeping investigative powers (rep.), no freedom of speech (dem.), direct judicial interference by unions (dem.),...

Ah. Gridlock avoids that particular downside quite well. The only way much change happens is when one party really controls both the legislature and the executive. We kind of saw that here in the US when Bush took office and both houses of Congress were controlled by his party. They did some republican agenda things like passing popular tax cuts, but refused to accept the unpopular responsibility of cutting government spending. (So we've been generating a huge deficit ever since he came into power, essentially financing the Iraq war on the promise that if I ever have grandchildren they will pay it back.)

So now the US is on the verge of "throwing the bums out" again. I guess it's not 100% hopeless for those of us who are fans of gridlock: the Democrats who are poised to take power have much internal squabbling and no coherent direction other than "away from George Bush", and can barely agree on anything themselves, so I'm not too worried that they'll pass much of their crazy platform either.

Great speech, and I like this aspect of the American system.But I was talking about the european system. Every party controls "bits" of all powers, law-giving, executive AND judicial in European countries.

So everything in government here gets always expanded, and gets expanded in incoherent directions (because ministers from different parties sabotage eachother with the arm of government they have at their disposal). The army got ordered to expand quite a bit (by a "centrum-right" party), and gets a 20% bud

European governments are utterly blocked and halted things. They never do anything.

You actually meant "they manage to do everything all at once, even the contradictory things, thus making most of what they do meaningless"? Because "they never do anything" implies that none of these laws get passed (which is what happens in the US when the parties are evenly balanced), but you're saying now that they just ALL get passed and because of that nothing works.

Oh, they have been doing that since 1976 (as recently revealed by a recording of FRA's director acknowledging it). This is an attempt to legalize that practice, add a few useless "control stations" and give them even more authority.

Oh, they have been doing that since 1976 (as recently revealed by a recording of FRA's director acknowledging it). This is an attempt to legalize that practice, add a few useless "control stations" and give them even more authority.

Actually they have been doing that since the 1950's. It was revealed in the "IB" scandal [wikipedia.org]. Named so after the secret buerau InformationsByrÃ¥n that conducted the registrations. It was big news in the late 1970's. At the time, there were lots of Communists in Sweden and the establishment with the Social Democrats in lead was genuinly afraid that they would take over.

So InformationsbyrÃ¥n was set up in secret and the information retrieved from the register was offensively used to keep the

It will be possible to look at every email v.s We will look at every email is different.
I don't think it's draconian to have such a law as long as there are reasonable restrictions on whose transmission even if intercepted is looked into and when they can do that.

It's already possible for the police to obtain a wiretap on anyone's subscriber line if they have a wiretap order from a competent court of law. They don't need any dedicated "wiretapping lines" for that; they can simply order the telco to establish the wiretap and send them the transmissions.

The current proposal, due to be voted on June 17, is not about creating dedicated lines to be used once in a while for transferring individual messages from senders singled out by a wiretap order.

The proposal is about creating dedicated lines to monitor all traffic passing any one of a number of access points 24/7, scanning the contents and metadata of every message for certain patterns (some sources claim there are to be around 250,000 search patterns in simultaneous use, all of them secret of course).

The FRA has claimed there will be no breach of privacy unless a message matches a pattern. This is a confusion of words at best, and a blatant lie at worst. It's like opening every letter handled by the post office, scanning it for an uncommon term like "hexamethyl fluoride", and then claiming only the privacy of messages containing the term "hexamethyl fluoride" has been breached, not the privacy of every other message.

Excuse me, but when anyone accesses my e-mail christmas greeting sent to a friend abroad to verify that I don't use the term "hexamethyl fluoride", my privacy has been breached regardless of whether I have used that term or not. And it doesn't matter a single bit to me that my message is scanned by a computer rather than a human, when I haven't the faintest idea of what that computer is looking for. Saying I'm unlikely to send a matching message doesn't resolve my complaint. I'm unlikely to be killed during a bank robbery too; that doesn't mean I will approve of making it legal for bank robbers to fire a gun at me.

When mass wiretapping is legalized and the physical infrastructure is implemented, there is nothing to stop this from being abused way beyond the original intentions, and the original intentions are unclear enough as it is. A committee of humans will oversee the world's fifth largest computer cluster scanning billions of messages every day for items matching a quarter of a million patterns, to make sure noone's privacy is being invaded without sufficient cause?

It's like watching a golf course from the club house during a thunderstorm to make sure the grass doesn't get wet.

And it's not like this 24/7 mass wiretapping programme is some unverified conspiracy theory. The technique to be used is described in the proposal [regeringen.se] itself, in the Proposed act on signals monitoring for military intelligence purposes ("Förslag till lag om signalspaning i försvarsunderrättelseverksamhet", pages 9-11), Article 3.

The good thing about this is that more people will become aware of the surveillance, whether it's legal or not, and hopefully begin defending their own privacy with the help of encryption and other means. It's a pity that it has become necessary, though.